


Your Slaughter Is Your Temptress

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mind Palace, POV John Watson, Self-Destruction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 18:23:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1909119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let the sun that came out of your own mouth warm you and let your bones be swallowed by this bloostained sand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Slaughter Is Your Temptress

Imagine it's night and the northern lights are painted across your cerebral cortex in wide, daring brushstrokes, interspersed by flecks of starlight. Now - and it's rare, so rare the wind has forgotten itself - everything is still. You're at such a height, such a distance from the waters below you that even the ebony waves, stretched out like fields of dead ravens, seem to have resorted to the comforting motionless of your thinking. This here is your mind, and in the starkness daylight brings everything is harsh and beautiful, like emerald faces carved into stone with hunting knives. 

The days are long and the nights are the short moments where you forget you're breathing. So when the morning comes towing the sunlight beyond the horizon, I will watch your body tumble from the peaches and the yellows that frame the clouds, tumble straight into the ocean. From there you'll swim like your body is made of salt and sea trout and your view will bend around you like you've never seen it before. You are, of course, lying. 

(When you first told me that your brain is a palace I envisaged voracious and predatory sandstone walls, aching corridors that bow and cower under the weight of all of your consciousness. Now I understand that your dominion is burning and alive and more powerful than you are, untamed and empyreal. Your bare feet leave fleeting and transient footsteps on cold, wet sand.)

There's a path of rubble strewn across the side of the cliff that you will pull yourself up until the palms of your hands are scraped and your feet are bleeding. You will use it because you always use it, because I always watch you choose the most difficult track to climb. And then, when the barbed dry grasses irritate your skin, when the air is so clear you'll inhale so much into yourself you will be drinking it, you'll turn your face into the wind and, as your curls dance past your ears in a pretence of joviality, you will move solemnly towards the space where peat and heather becomes nothing and the ragged shelf of rocks on the beach below entice you. 

Every day I watch you struggle up the hill with grass and mud streaked across your skin like warpaint, your laboured breathing lost to the wind like a private battle cry. And every day I watch you press your body against the air with your toes hooked over the edge of the drop and you slowly let yourself fall, like one might fall into dreams, dashing yourself on the graveyard of the cliff face below you. 

I realise this island you built on foundations of forgotten memories sings tunes that I can't even begin to understand. I realise that. But for once, let the air wash over you and care for you in ways that you've never allowed it to before, in ways that I never have. 

I can't watch you destroy yourself any more, not one more time. Lay your aching and broken bones out on the grass, lay them out like a railway system. The sun will turn your weary dust into flecks of light, trapped in rocks and under the ocean. Listen to the sound the silence makes when the sand is no longer painted red and taste the air of this version of your Atlantic.

I am sitting on your left, watching your motionless body fight battles miles away. You don't know I've been here for fifteen minutes. Your hands are pressed together over your mouth in a mockery of prayer. So I think, "Your mind, your thoughts-- wild and so ferocious that I could never step foot on this island you crafted behind the hollows of your eyes. But this is yours. Allow yourself freedom and your own control over the waters surrounding you, carve your own paths into mossy outcrops and make the wildflowers trace the lightning trails of veins across your closed eyelids."

Of course, you don't hear me. You're too busy stumbling towards the evening light coruscating off every vertex of the waves, too engrossed in the barren field of rocks below your feet, rugged and malignantly fateful. As I sit here your body carries you over the peak again, and you begin to fall.


End file.
